Tweet

Essential Marketing Metrics for Small Business Owners

Guest post by: Jennifer Davey

Article Overview: As a self-employed professional or small business owner, time is your most valuable resource. It can be tough to juggle business with life and create balance. The best way to make the most of your time is to implement metrics. Metrics will allow you to measure results of your actions so that you can better manage your available time.

Essential Marketing Metrics for Small Business Owners

As a self-employed professional or small business owner, time is your most valuable resource. It can be tough to juggle business with life and create balance. The best way to make the most of your time is to implement metrics. Metrics will allow you to measure results of your actions so that you can better manage your available time.

Below, I have provided a list of key metrics that I urge all my clients to track. Any metric you track should be easy and quick to compile and review. Be sure to check your metrics weekly, this lets you know very quickly when something is awry and keeps you from getting to far of your business success roadmap. This is a good task to give to your virtual assistant, if you employ one. You should be able to compile and review this material in about 15 a minutes a week.

Website Metrics:

(My favorite – Google Analytics – It’s free!)

• Metric: Keywords used to find your site.

• Why it’s important: This lets you know if the keywords you are using in your articles and blog posts are pulling the “right” kinds of traffic to your site, and it lets you identify topics that are trending upward.

• Metric: Your current website traffic in relation to last week and last month.

• Why it’s important: This gives you a sense of how your efforts are unfolding over time. If you’re getting a lot of new visitors this week or this month, then it means you’re on the right track.

• Metric: The percentage of visitors to your site who sign up for your mailing list or newsletter.

• Why it’s important: This tells you whether or not your call-to-action to sign up is effective or is in need of tweaking. It may also give you ideas for how to play with your layout. (In other words, does moving the sign up box up, down, left or right effect the subscription rate? You might be surprised)

• Metric: The number of repeat visitors to your site.

• Why it’s important: If you have many people who return to your site repeatedly, it means that people view your content as high-quality and relevant.

• Metric: The dollar value of every visitor to your site (i.e., the value of sales divided by the number of unique visitors).

• Why it’s important: It keeps you from spending more per visitor than you can earn.

• Metric: The number of people who became clients, or bought something.

• Why it’s important: This tells you your conversion rate (the percentage of your visitors who purchased something), and it lets you play with your marketing tactics to find ways to raise your conversion rate.

Newsletter metrics:

(My favorite –AWeber for its metrics)

• Metric: The percentage of people who looked at your newsletter.

• Why it’s important: This tells you whether or not your subject line is compelling, which subject lines seem to do better, and which don’t work at all. If your subject line isn’t compelling, no one is going to open to newsletter to read it.

• Metric: The percentage of people who followed the call-to-action in your newsletter.

• Why it’s important: It tells you which calls to action are effective and which need work.

Marketing campaign metrics:

• Metric: How your leads are generated—which of your marketing techniques pull clients to you?

• Why it’s important: It lets you focus on the marketing techniques that are most effective for drawing in new customers.

• Metric: Which marketing technique drew in the best-converting leads, and which were most profitable?

• Why it’s important: This lets you focus on the most profitable marketing techniques and set aside the ones that don’t earn as much.

• Metric: What are the results of your marketing leads? Do the people download reports? Do they purchase something? Do they become clients?

• Why it’s important: This gives you a clearer idea of what your target market is most interested in and what they are reluctant to do.

Related Articles
  Who Cares More-Sales or Marketing?
  Quality in Marketing: You must start with these 2 definitions
  More Thoughts on Marketing Analytics
  Defining Success Metrics for Corporate Blogs
  Best of the Janes: Tracking Business Performance
  The business process that no longer works
  How to Measure the Effect of Press Releases
  Standardized Marketing Metrics and Organizational Singularity
  Why would someone come to work for you?
  CMO.com | Study Finds Marketers Don\'t Practice ROI They Preach
  Leading Lead Generation & Inside Sales
  W is for Why is my marketing not working?
  Strategies for Exceptional Growth
  Monitoring Inside Sales Productivity
  Performance Metrics
  GOT MARKETING?
  Measuring Marketing Results in 2009
  Marketing Dashboard Best Practices
  Lead Generation Best Practices: Measure Beyond Cost-Per-Lead
  Eleven Ways to Generate Leverage from Your Business

Article Tags: attract clients, get clients, need clients, want clients



Related Forum Posts
New Small Business Topic - Hello everyone, I'm on the lookout for new topics to add to my site. We just launched a Franchising section and are planning Human Resources section. Do you have any thoughts for a new section? Here's a list of what we currently have: Angel Investors Branding Bank Loans Business Coaching Business Plan Franchises (New) Insurance Legal Marketing Public Relations Sales Small Biz Loans Venture Capital
My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
A ton of Great Women - You might want to profile Teresa Cascioli of LakePort Brewery. She has an amazing story! I met her at at the celebratory luncheon for the Profit/Chatelaine Top 100 Women Business Owners. The Top 100 list is also a great resource for inspirational stories of Women Entrepreneurs.
These maybe the coldest franchises out there: - Here are the worst 15 performing franchises in regards to having the highest Small Business Administration (SBA) loan failure rates. The list is dotted with sub sandwich shops, fitness centers and car shops. WORST FRANCHISE LOAN FAILURES Failure % 1 OBEE'S SOUP SALAD SUBS 55.56% 2 LADY OF AMERICA 41.94% 3 COUNTRY CLUTTER (BED & BREAKFAST) 41.18% 4 COPY CLUB 36.36% 5 ALL TUNE AND LUBE 35.71% 6 PICKERMAN'S 35.71% 7 PHILLY CONNECTION 35.59% 8 ROLY POLY ROLLED SANDWICHES 34.78% 9 COTTMAN TRANSMISSION 34.48% 10 HAIR COLOR EXPRESS 33.33% 11 LEE MYLES AUTOMOTIVE TRANSMISSIONS 33.33% 12 GODFATHER'S PIZZA 33.33% 13 SMOOTHIE FACTORY 33.33% 14 BLIMPIE 31.39% 15 GOLF U.S.A. (RETAIL GOLF EQUIP.) 30.77% Source: Small Business Administration, SBA Loan Performance Within Franchise Code for the Period of FY 2001 - 2005
Exclusive: Interview with Results - Hi Forum Members, I'm helping start up a Business Coaching and Consulting company here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada (a Subsidiary of RSC Business in Los Angeles). As a Research and Development Intern I am required to practice my listening and interview skills by surveying Small and Medium Businesses on thier Business. This Survey is designed by RSC Business to also assist the Business being interviewed more insight into their own business. I am looking to interview about 30 businesses across North America over the span of 3 months. At the end of these interviews I will be publishing a report of the results and they will be made available for free to the Interviewees. The Report data will include responses from a minimum of 100 interviews. I would like to extend this opportunity to members of the Forum. If you would like to have this short 20-30 minute interview conducted on your Business and you reside in North America please send me an email or PM. Please contact me at andy[at]jvprosperity[dot]com to arrange our interview and to get free access to the results when they are published.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Coaching Tip: Identify Your Core Values

Resistance to Change and How to Deal With It

Are You Fulfilled

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.